Christian Anti Semitism and Paul's Theology by Sidney G. Hall III
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Apology or Apologia, It's a Mess

Last week, for the first time, I met a GR nut-job. A self-described psychologist, I found out after accepting a friend request, he was reading a book by the American fascist David Duke. My new-found friend was posting a sort of progressive review of this book, quoting liberally as he went about the evils perpetrated by US Jews and helpfully adding pictures of many of the culprits that he had found on the internet. I challenged him several times about both his interest in Duke and his use of the term 'Jewish question' in his GR comments. He saw nothing wrong or inappropriate about his activities in response to fairly gentle chiding by me. So after 'de-friending' him, I thought it might be a suitable time to put some relevant reviews on the site. Hence this review.

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The earliest Christian scriptures, by as much as half a century, are those of Paul of Tarsus, a Jewish Pharisee or strict observer, who felt called to spread the message that he interpreted as Jesus’s to the non-Jews of the Roman Empire. Following the classical rules of rhetoric, Paul liked to adapt his message to his audience. So the Greeks got a piece on the Unknown God, and the diaspora Jews were treated to biblical references. But quite unlike either Jesus, his family, or any of the original twelve followers, Paul, never having met Jesus, rejected Judaism when it got in the way of his interpretations of the meaning of Jesus. The vehemence with which he did so infiltrated not just the Gospels (certainly in that of his man Luke but in all the others as well) but also the subsequent doctrinal and social attitude towards Judaism throughout the entire history of Christianity. Hence the centrality of Hall’s work.

Hall recognises the fundamental and long-standing scandal of Anti-Semitism in Christianity. That it has existed, still exists, and that its existence is promoted by the Gospels, Church Fathers, theologians ancient and modern, and leads directly to the theoreticians of the Third Reich and beyond is not in doubt. What Hall proposes, however, is that this persistent Anti-Semitic strain in Christianity is the result of a misinterpretation of (but definitely not by) Paul. That what Paul really meant did not call for either the theology nor the ethics of Anti-Semitism which have become endemic to Christian culture.

In other words, Hall wants a reason to stay Christian. He can’t in conscience do that given perennial Christian behaviour. So he must find a cause for this behaviour that still supplies some sort of credibility to Christian origins. Consequently, although disguised as a sort of apology to Jews for centuries of debasement and persecution by Christians, his book is actually an apologia, a justification, for why he, Hall, minister of Christian religion, does not chuck his vocation, his living, and a large part of his culture in the waste bin. The book seeks, more positively, to attribute the hate, horror, and death of Jews at the hands of Christians to an unfortunate but correctable misunderstanding.

According to Hall, it is a myth that it was Paul’s intention to make a disruptive distinction between, traditional Judaism and Christianity. The evidence he provides is Paul’s self-confessed Judaism (for example in his Epistle to the Romans). However, both the context and the substance of Paul’s letter shows his identification as Jewish is made in order first to ingratiate himself in typical Pauline style and then to use his very Judaism as sufficient authority to re-interpret it in a hostile way. Paul’s ‘cosmic dream’ is patently clear: to replace the Torah, the Jewish Law, by Christ, that is to say, Paul's law.

Hall then proceeds to the logically and theologically incomprehensible Epistle to the Galatians. In it Paul simultaneously confirms the eternal Judaic covenant of the scriptures and condemns it as partisan and obsolescent. Paul’s analogy of Hagar and Sarah, in which he attempts, grotesquely, to claim that his followers are the true Jews, is denied by Hall for what it patently is, a bald-faced usurpation of the covenant. Paul’s explicit target in this letter were the ‘Judaizers’, those who still clung to Jewish ritual, those who would not submit to his theologically outrageous claims for a uniquely correct interpretation. Egalitarian, in some sense, Paul may have been in the dismissal of Jewish tradition, but only at the cost of an imperious religious tyranny.

And it is this tyranny which has survived in both doctrine and ecclesiastical organisation ever since Paul. Unity in Christianity has always meant doctrinal submission to a credal formula approved by a singular authority - the emperor, the pope, the reformer, the charismatic leader - and has scant connection with the realities of daily life. This is the Christian way, a metaphysical conformity of belief rather than a practical adherence to norms of relationship. Law is not abolished as Paul circuitously claims. It is self-evidently replaced, as anyone who has ever glanced at the volumes of the Code of Canon Law knows. As such this new law will always find its source in Paul and its target in Jews.

As an apology, this book is insipid. As an apologia, it is merely another attempt to square the circle of Christian belief in the inferiority of Jews. It fails on both counts. The 'law written on the heart' was an ideal of early rabbinic Judaism, not something unique in the teaching of Jesus. In any case that teaching has been betrayed consistently by the very institutions that pretend to act in his name. If a mistake has been made, it’s likely lie a bit closer to the bone and to be a bit harder to correct than Hall believes.

Postscript 13May19: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...

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